Observation/Reflection #4 - What Was the Question?
This week, try to pay attention to how your teacher asks questions and facilitates discussion in his or her classes. What types of questions does your CT ask? Are most of the questions asking students to relay facts or textbook definitions (recall) or to apply a concept to a new situation or compare it to another concept (application or analysis). Does your teacher ever encourage his or her students to be critical or skeptical? If so, when and how? Does your CT ever ask students to provide evidence to support a claim or explain their thinking? Does your teacher facilitate classroom discussion so that students are expressing scientific ideas to other students? Finally, does your CT vary the type of questions he or she asks depending on the level of the class, or the perceived ability of the student? Remember to reflect on what types of classroom discourse you want to foster in your classroom, how you will go about doing this, and why.
Many of the questions that are asked in class are recall. The students are preparing for thier next formal lab covering the heat curve of water. She had given them a pop quiz the day before covering kinetic theory and today the students corrected each other's quiz. As she read the questions, she had the students answer. (The quiz used a graph so the students could complete (fill in the blanks) a paragraph.) From there, she went into a lecture describing the heat curve of water in detail. She drew a heat curve on the board and had the students copy it and label 13 different points along the curve. She asked them to describe what was happening on a particle level at each point. She gave them about 20 minutes to complete this and the decided "to make it easier for them" with going over each point on the curve together. One specific question I remember her asking the class is, "Are heat and temperature the same?" From there she discussed why burns from steam are so severe.
On another occasion, I had the opportunity to see a test given on the classification of matter. The Honors class had an additional sheet of short answer questions but the college prep class test did not. This shows that she does vary the type of questions asked depending on the level of the class.
I think if she wanted to make labelling the heat curve easier for this class, she could have written names of points found on the heat curve as a list, instead of labelling it for them.
Ex. Label the following points
Heat of Fusion
Melting Point
Boiling Point
Gas
Solid
Liquid
Heat of Vaporization
particle movement at solid state, liquid state and gas state
bonds breaking
If they still had problems, then she might have helped them a little more - maybe label it from solid to liquid and then see if they can connect the same thing will happen going from liquid to gas, but with more (faster) particle movement and more bonds breaking.
Normally, there is much dicussion during class between Mrs. P and her students, but this week was exceptionally difficult for everyone. Two students who attend Chariho died in a car accident. Many students left school early this day to attend services. It is possible that because of this devastating event, students could not stay focused in class, and perhaps why Mrs. P made the assignment easier for them.
Observation/Reflection #4 - What Was the Question?
This week, try to pay attention to how your teacher asks questions and facilitates discussion in his or her classes. What types of questions does your CT ask? Are most of the questions asking students to relay facts or textbook definitions (recall) or to apply a concept to a new situation or compare it to another concept (application or analysis). Does your teacher ever encourage his or her students to be critical or skeptical? If so, when and how? Does your CT ever ask students to provide evidence to support a claim or explain their thinking? Does your teacher facilitate classroom discussion so that students are expressing scientific ideas to other students? Finally, does your CT vary the type of questions he or she asks depending on the level of the class, or the perceived ability of the student? Remember to reflect on what types of classroom discourse you want to foster in your classroom, how you will go about doing this, and why.Many of the questions that are asked in class are recall. The students are preparing for thier next formal lab covering the heat curve of water. She had given them a pop quiz the day before covering kinetic theory and today the students corrected each other's quiz. As she read the questions, she had the students answer. (The quiz used a graph so the students could complete (fill in the blanks) a paragraph.) From there, she went into a lecture describing the heat curve of water in detail. She drew a heat curve on the board and had the students copy it and label 13 different points along the curve. She asked them to describe what was happening on a particle level at each point. She gave them about 20 minutes to complete this and the decided "to make it easier for them" with going over each point on the curve together. One specific question I remember her asking the class is, "Are heat and temperature the same?" From there she discussed why burns from steam are so severe.
On another occasion, I had the opportunity to see a test given on the classification of matter. The Honors class had an additional sheet of short answer questions but the college prep class test did not. This shows that she does vary the type of questions asked depending on the level of the class.
I think if she wanted to make labelling the heat curve easier for this class, she could have written names of points found on the heat curve as a list, instead of labelling it for them.
Ex. Label the following points
- Heat of Fusion
- Melting Point
- Boiling Point
- Gas
- Solid
- Liquid
- Heat of Vaporization
- particle movement at solid state, liquid state and gas state
- bonds breaking
If they still had problems, then she might have helped them a little more - maybe label it from solid to liquid and then see if they can connect the same thing will happen going from liquid to gas, but with more (faster) particle movement and more bonds breaking.Normally, there is much dicussion during class between Mrs. P and her students, but this week was exceptionally difficult for everyone. Two students who attend Chariho died in a car accident. Many students left school early this day to attend services. It is possible that because of this devastating event, students could not stay focused in class, and perhaps why Mrs. P made the assignment easier for them.